>This tactic is working, at least in the sense that “ideological diversity” is now a deeply misunderstood concept.

You can say that again! And you, too, are guilty of deeply misunderstanding it.

>The push for “ideological diversity” as a curative

A “curative”? No defender of ideological diversity does so because he or she believes it will “cure” something.

>. . . confuses the benefit of dialectical learning with the notion that all ideas are worth debating.

Wrong. No defender of ideological diversity ever claimed that “all ideas are worth debating.” That’s a silly straw-man argument meant for those in the choir to whom you are preaching: i.e., those who love the idea of ideological regimentation, in which only “approved” ideas get the privilege (granted by the Official Campus Idea Approver) of even being expressed, let alone debated.

>History is littered with horrible ideas that aren’t worth poking holes into during a question-and-answer session.

Quite true, though anyone who was intellectually honest would admit that most of history’s ideas fall into a middle ground in which people passionately take sides but in which there’s no clear-cut way to determine if the ideas are truly worthless and “horrible.”

>“The earth is flat,” for instance.

I can tell you’ve done no research on this at all, conflating your scant knowledge of intellectual history, and your opinions on diversity, with truth — for just a little reading up on this particular example shows that at NO time in history was there ever an idea in the popular mind of mankind at large that the earth was flat. Never. Not in antiquity. Not in the middle ages. In fact, it wasn’t until the modern age — the 19th century — the The Flat Earth Society was founded.

I suspect your lack of knowledge of that particular example will be typical of your other examples, as well.

>“Women’s suffrage is incompatible with democracy.” (That last one basically describes something that Zuckerberg’s ideologically diverse associate Thiel once wrote.)

See what I mean? Thiel did not write “women’s suffrage is incompatible with democracy”, but you assumed he did, and then through guilt-by-association, tried to accuse Zuckerberg of the same thing. It’s well known by economic historians and pollsters that the majority of women vote left. Thus, they might support some vision of democracy such as “social democracy” but not “capitalist democracy” (Thiel’s phrase); in other words, the majority of women voters have never supported the ideal of “classical liberalism.” Whether or not this is “problematic” for libertarians is simply Thiel’s opinion (Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand — the three women founders of 20th century libertarianism—would vehemently disagree). So part of the problem here — aside from your intentional misquote of Thiel—is your inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish carefully between statements expressing facts and statements expressing opinions about those facts. You also appear to assume that if you happen to be personally offended by either the fact or the opinion, then all of the statements are “horrible”; none of them worth debating; and coercive measures — such as pulling hair and causing concussions—are worthy tactics to simply shut the person up.

>When students come out against ideas like this, they aren’t succumbing to dumb mob-think.

They are IF the students themselves are dumb and part of a mob of other dumb students — which happens to be the case most often.

“Hurtful”? You mean emotionally hurtful, right? Students have a “right” not to “feel offended” by a speaker or writer? If so, they can easily exercise that “right” by doing something you haven’t mentioned: just walk away and don’t listen to the speaker. Don’t read his or her books. Easy.

Oh, and by the way, you’re wrong about Charles Murray, too. His book on the bell curve has not been “discredited”, and it merely claims that IQ and intelligence in general have a genetic component; something that many social statiticians and psychologists agree with. That a far-leftist organization such as the Southern Poverty Law Center might groundlessly assert that the author is a “white nationalist” is irrelevant, and is no different from the equally intolerant Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, accusing every Jew of having been a “Marxist communist.” Oddly enough, Marx himself believed almost every Jew was a “capitalist exploiter” of proletarian labor. So much for the views of the ideologically non-diverse.